‘Or kangaroo steak,’ he said gravely. ‘Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’
‘At last. We have consensus.’
They might have had a consensus on dinner, but they sat at either side of Tammy’s tiny table and eyed each other as if either could produce a loaded automatic at any minute.
Marc poured wine, and Tammy eyed that, too, with distrust.
‘No, Miss Dexter,’ he told her. ‘The wine doesn’t contain poison, and I’m not trying to get you drunk.’
‘I wouldn’t put it past you.’
Marc closed his eyes. When he opened them the humour had gone. There was bleak acceptance of where she was coming from.
‘What was in the letter?’
‘I’d imagine you know.’
‘I know very little,’ he told her. ‘I had little to do with my cousin. Our families were not close.’
‘How can you be Prince Regent if your families were not close?’
‘I never expected to inherit the crown. Jean-Paul had an older brother, Franz, who was killed in a car racing accident five years ago. After Franz’s death Jean-Paul inherited the crown. With two cousins before me I’d never imagined it could come to me. And I don’t want it.’
She frowned. ‘You don’t want it?’
‘Believe it or not, no.’
‘So why…?’
‘There’s no one else,’ he said heavily. ‘Except Henry. Tell me what was in the letter.’
Tammy bit her lip. She took a sip of the wine, which was gorgeous-Marc certainly knew how to order wine-and thought about it. The letter was intensely personal, but maybe the time for keeping secrets was past.
She focused on the food for a bit: lobster and salad and fries. It was a combination that was just what she felt like. At some level she was very, very hungry.
But overriding hunger was the sensation that maybe she needed to be honest with this man.
There’d been enough secrets.
‘My sister seemed…desperate,’ she told him. ‘Her letter sounds like she was way out of her depth. She apologised for not letting me know about her marriage and her pregnancy. She said our mother engineered her meeting with Jean-Paul and pushed them both into marriage. I can believe that.’
‘I can believe it too,’ Marc said softly. ‘I hate to say it, but your sister seemed…well, she seemed a wimp. I only met her the once, at her wedding. She was a fairytale princess but a wimp just the same.’
‘Lara always did what my mother wanted,’ Tammy said sadly. ‘From the time Isobelle took any notice of her Lara was her puppet. Fights are all that was ever between my mother and me, from as far back as I can remember, but by the time Lara was ten or eleven she was beautiful and she was biddable. Isobelle schooled her well in the art of making it in the world by using men.’
‘So Jean-Paul would have seemed desirable?’
‘Isobelle used to call Lara a princess,’ Tammy said, and the old bitterness was still in her voice. ‘She wanted it so much. My father was titled and moneyed, and for a while Isobelle thought she’d scored a title for herself. That was why she got pregnant with me. But even after she had me my father refused to marry her. It was a waste of a pregnancy so far as Isobelle was concerned. And maybe it explains why she hates me so much.’
‘She hates you?’
But Tammy wasn’t about to be sidetracked onto things that didn’t matter. ‘Isobelle married four times,’ she told him. ‘Lara was another pregnancy to force some man to marry her. And she succeeded. The marriage lasted for a whole eighteen months.’
‘Lara was like her?’
‘Obedience was her way of getting affection. We did what our mother wanted or there was no affection at all.’
Marc’s eyes watched Tammy. He knew what she was saying. There was a lifetime of bitterness behind the words. But he didn’t comment. He waited for her to continue, and in a while she did.
‘Anyway…anyway, as Lara got older my mother dragged Lara with her in her stupid schemes. Lara was too weak to see the pitfalls of the men my mother found for her. According to her letter, Jean-Paul scared her but she was too spineless to do anything about it. She let Isobelle push her into marriage. Then when Henry was six months old-they were in Paris and Isobelle had dropped in for a flying visit-Lara went shopping and returned to find one of Jean-Paul’s crazy friends trying to feed Henry drugs. Jean-Paul thought it was funny. That was enough to get through Lara’s thick skull. She wasn’t bad. She was just…spineless.’
‘So she sent Henry back to Australia with your mother?’
‘She sent him to me.’
‘According to her letter she asked Isobelle to bring the baby to me.’ Tammy shrugged. ‘I’m the one who’s dragged Lara out of trouble in the past. Even though we were separated, Lara knew I wouldn’t have refused.’
‘But Isobelle didn’t bring Henry to you?’
‘No.’ Tammy shook her head, still thinking it through. ‘How could she have brought the baby to me? She would have had to find me, for a start. Then she would have had to explain what was going on and I might have yelled at her. It was far easier to dump Henry in a hotel with his nanny and tell Lara she couldn’t find me. Or that I wasn’t interested. Or she might even have told Lara that I was involved in caring for him. Heaven knows.’ She bit her lip and her face hardened. ‘Isobelle will tell me.’
Marc looked across the table at her, his face thoughtful. ‘So there’s no love lost between you and your mother?’
‘None.’
‘Lara’s hardly blameless. Surely a mother would have checked on her baby?’
‘By the sound of it…’ Tammy said, her voice fading to a whisper. ‘By the style of the writing it seems as if Lara was out of it, too.’
He thought about that and nodded. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised. If I’d had live with Jean-Paul maybe that would have been the only way I could face him.’
‘He was that bad?’
‘He was that bad.’
‘My mother must have known.’
He didn’t respond. There was no response to give. For a while there was total silence.
‘Your fries are getting cold,’ he said at last, and Tammy caught herself.
‘I…yes.’
‘They’re good.’
‘They are, aren’t they?’ she said, and managed a smile. He smiled back at her.
There it was again. That smile. It was a knockout. It brought sunshine where there’d been only blackness. It seemed as if where there was this smile her world couldn’t be all that dreadful.
Not if this man was in it.
Now, that was a crazy thing to think, she thought savagely. This man and his family were the cause of all this…mess.
Henry.
Her eyes slid sideways to the cot and Marc followed her gaze.
‘It’s not a total disaster,’ he said softly, and her eyes swung back to him in surprise. As well as everything else, did he have the capacity to read minds?
‘Why do you want him to go home…?’ She corrected herself. ‘To go
‘He must.’
‘You surely don’t want a child?’
‘No, but…’
‘Charles called you the Prince Regent. So that makes you the ruler of the country. Right?’
